Palace Interactive Team

A little while ago, we posted a poll over on our Twitter (which you should totally go and follow if you don't already 😘) asking you what we should talk about in our first blog post about the project our team is working on. We're keeping our word, and writing about the option that won most of the votes with 40% of the total votes going to User Profiles.

So! Let's go ahead and get into some key points about what your profile will look like on our platform. As a reminder, we want you all to remember that we're still in the early stages of development and what you see might not be what we end up using exactly, but the overall concept won't be changing.

Whenever you have a social gathering whether it be in person, online in a game, on a website, or wherever else it's human nature to want to know who you're talking to or hanging out with. I know when I send a tweet on Twitter, I love seeing the different people who respond and I definitely love being able to read their short bio so I know who they are. We designed our public user profiles to help you gather that information about the users you're chatting with, and I'll do a quick breakdown of the various parts of the profile.

Account Overview

One of the very first things you'll notice on a user's profile is what we call the "Account Overview". The Account Overview displays the user's name, and some top level information about their account such as any special groups they're a part of, what account level they are (more on that soon™), how many friends they have, the amount of community awards they've received, and how many communities they've joined. You'll also notice that profiles have editable statuses, the quick abilities to add an individual as a friend, private message them, and even report them if needed.

Snippet from a user's profile page.

This part of the Profile page is most likely the first part of the page you'll see, so we wanted to make sure we provided the most relevant information about the user here. We also wanted to make the most common functions super easy for you to find and access so you don't have to go searching for too long to find out how to do what you are looking to do.

We believe being able to identify official accounts is super important to the safety and security of our users. We know how hard it can be sometimes to identify if a user is maliciously trying to gain access to your account by posing as a staff member or community helper so we're adding badges to all users with elevated permissions such as our Community Support Volunteer team, our Staff Team and our Administrators.

SIDE NOTE: Community Support Volunteers, Staff Members, or Administrators will NEVER ask you for your password!

In a way, your user profile is an extension of you - it's one of the first things people will see about you on our platform, so we want to make sure you're able to customize at least some of it with information about you which is why we've introduced statuses.

Your status should be a brief line of text outlining what you're up to, if you're looking to play games, if your favorite baseball team won their home game and you're excited, if your favorite music artist released a new album, and so on. This message will be displayed not just on your profile page, but on your profile card when users hover over you, and in various other places around the platform. Due to the fact that your status is viewable globally, we ask that you keep your status appropriate for all of our users, and these statuses are moderated by our system automatically.

Account Information

Your account overview provides basic information about your account as that's the first thing we expect users to see, but moving down from your account overview is all of your public account information that you can control access to. This section is where your "About Me" is going to live, along with any account connections you've made, the awards you've earned and what communities you've joined!

(psst! Remember, you're able to control who sees what on your profile page, so if you only want friends to see your About Me, that's perfectly fine and you'll be able to set that up in your account settings, and so on!)

Design Mockup of the User Profiles page

We want you to have the ability to tell other users who you are, and show off any awards that you've received during your time on our platform. It's also important to us that our users are able to make friends with people that have similar interests, and what better way than being able to view a user's profile to see what they enjoy doing most on our platform?

Having the ability to connect accounts like your Epic Games Account, your Twitter, Spotify, Blizzard Account, etc. is going to give us the ability to display more of your statistics in the future. An example of this would be if you play Overwatch, we would be able to pull your Overwatch statistics and display them natively on your profile.

Who wouldn't want to show off that they have those pro Mercy strats? 😱

When you put your Account Overview and Account Information together, that's what gives you a well rounded user profile. We're really excited to see you all customizing your profile to the way you want to be represented.

Who knows, maybe you'll be able to add a profile header image along with your profile picture? The customization options are endless, and we really want to give you all the opportunity to be able to represent yourselves on your profile.

This is a complete representation of a user's profile!

Keeping you all updated with what we're working on is super important to us, and we're really excited to bring you along on this journey with us. It's also important that you all get to hear about the things that you're most interested in, in regards to our platform and what we're creating. 40% of you voted to have user profiles discussed first, and 23.8% of you wanted to learn about Moderation on our platform, so we'll make sure that our next blog post regarding our platform is about Moderation! Be on the lookout for that, it should be coming out very soon! We'll use that as an opportunity to discuss how we plan on having proactive and reactive global moderation features on our platform, as well as how users are going to be able to moderate the communities that they create.

Once again, we're all really excited to bring you on this journey with us, and we can't wait for you to get your hands on the platform that we're creating. We have an amazing team of individuals working tirelessly on creating something we hope you all will love.